Is short-termism killing the industry?

In the early stages of a noisy new trend, we mustn’t lose sight of the more robust tech solutions, warns Rockabox’s James Booth.

I had a word with myself at the weekend. The question I now ask is: was it laziness or lack of motivation that meant I completely failed to nail the short list of DIY I’d planned and confidently promised? Or was it the head-full of Friday evening grog that felt a tad strange but seemed so alarmingly effective at the time.

Either way, I failed, and equally failed in digging up any resemblance of a convincing excuse.

If we can get away with little, we often do. How many times have you looked in awe at a work of art and wondered how on earth the individual responsible stayed upright and sane long enough to finish it?

I find similar patterns in the online advertising world; an environment that over recent years has seen more than its fair share of a ‘that’ll do it, they’ll never know’ approach to product offerings. There are some works of art out there; there are some two-bit…well, you get the picture.

It’s those latter types that frustrate me. Maybe I’m jealous because often they seem to be the ones coining it, but too often at the expense of the user.

What am I talking about? Let’s take retargeting for example – I’ve always wondered about that one. I’m no fashionista but every now and then I brave a bit of online clothes shopping for a laugh, but the laughing soon stops when the bombardment kicks off and those pants follow me around my web world for weeks on end even though I’m now sporting them handsomely.

That fine line between gently reminding someone that they’d thought about a purchase, and forcing the product at them so aggressively that one thing’s for sure, they’ll not be buying pants from that outlet again, if at all. Retargeting is a marvellous device but it sometimes feels only partially complete. I’m sure if brands knew how damaging over exposure in an aggressive way can be, they’d probably let the pants go.

I have a similar frustration with pre-roll advertising. I completely understand the objective: advert in front of content, but too often it seems that someone in Pre-roll Control Tower Central thinks we need more of a helping hand grasping an advertiser’s message than perhaps we do.

I have to believe that the only valid reason for playing the same pre-roll ad every time a user attempts to access a piece of content on YouTube, for example, is to make money. Granted, this new programmatic gig needs putting through its paces – squeeze the last ounce of juice out of the targeting because we can; unfortunately the reach plummets as a result, but session capping removal should sort delivery volumes out as long as no one knows. Well, the poor user does.

But it’s not just abuse of retargeting and pre-roll; I’ve seen it in even more depressing measures with bot-friendly content distribution and explosive, auto-play rich media advertising. Where a tech solution can’t deliver the goods properly, it seems the easiest response is to fluff the reporting and cover up where or how the creative actually ended up. Easy.

We’re generally pretty tidy when it comes to tech development in the UK. I like that. The downside is that we often over-engineer and take an age to bring a viable product from R&D to revenue generating.

We have spirit, but often no offering, and in the early stages of a noisy new trend, those slow-burn tech shops tend not to get that much cake if they’re invited to the party at all. And it’s that party that I for one don’t really want an invite to. It’s a gathering for the short-termists whose main focus is a super-quick buck rather than a high-quality offering. Perhaps the collective noun is ‘wallet’ – a wallet of short-termists.

It makes me think of roofing ridge tiles; or in my case, the lack of some of them. Less than a year after they were put up, some of them are down again, and in bits. Why is finding a builder who will do the job with care, right through to the end, so hard?

Is short-termism killing online marketing? Nope. There are lots of full wallets out there and no end of flaky tech that just about does enough to look the part, but fortunately, there are some masterpieces in play too and these products are pointing at an increasingly interesting future for digital marketing.

Luckily for us in the UK, our more robust solutions tend to win out further down the line when, as it inevitably does, the industry goes flying off on a tangent such as when HTML5 or programmatic landed with a bump, leaving the wallet-brigade scratching their heads wondering how they didn’t see this coming.

James Booth is founder and group CEO of Rockabox.